


unidentified

by blueskiddoo



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Statement Fic (The Magnus Archives), The Lonely - Freeform, The Stranger - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-02
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:34:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28493196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blueskiddoo/pseuds/blueskiddoo
Summary: Ah. Statement of...Unknown, regarding the death of her son and subsequent memory loss. Recorded direct from subject, 15th July, 2018.Statement begins.*Original Statement done for the Avatar of Fear zine.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 20





	unidentified

**Author's Note:**

> CW: death of a child, terminal illness, grief, depersonalization, memory loss, child abuse (mentioned)

“Unidentified”  
Case #0181507

[TAPE CLICKS ON]

****

****

ARCHIVIST

Statement of...I’m sorry, what’s your name again?

**UNKNOWN**

Oh, I—I suppose that’s the problem. I don’t have one.

****

ARCHIVIST 

You don’t...have a name?

**UNKNOWN**

Or, well, I did. Once. I just...can’t remember it.

****

ARCHIVIST

...I see.

Shall we call you Jane Doe then?

**UNKNOWN**

I’d rather you didn’t.

****

ARCHIVIST

Very well.

Ah. Statement of...Unknown, regarding the death of her son and subsequent memory loss. Recorded direct from subject, 15th July, 2018. 

Statement begins.

**UNKNOWN**

I’m sorry about this. It’s not...none of this is comfortable, I know. For either of us, I suppose. People don’t like ugly things. The mundane tragedies, the simple griefs...no one wants to hear about something like that, not unless they can distill it down into an inspirational video, 90 seconds or less. We frown, we shake our heads, and we look away. Quickly, before the bad luck can find us too. We think—and don’t feel bad, I know you’ve done it, we all have—we think: thank God it’s them and not me. I’m safe. For just a little longer, I’m safe.

Doesn’t last forever though, does it? The safety. You know all about that.

****

ARCHIVIST

I don’t know what you mean.

**UNKNOWN**

Yes, you do.

****

ARCHIVIST

I…

**UNKNOWN**

I never thought I would have children. I do remember that. I never thought I wanted them either, but when it happened...well, it happened. Midway through a production of Hamlet, actually, though I didn’t realize it until a few months on. Long enough that I was certainly not going to hear from Horatio again.

I worked as a stage manager at a local theater at the time. It didn’t pay well, I’ll tell you that, but most of the time it was worth it. There’s a magnetism to the stage. About being someone else, somewhere else, but also about being seen. I was so envious sometimes, watching the actors put themselves out there without hesitation, grinning under the stage lights like they had nothing to hide. They made it look so easy, as if they left their true selves back in the wings, trading their faces for masks as they passed behind the heavy velvet curtains. It was magical. Which...I suppose is what got me in trouble with Horatio.

Actors. I should have known better.

Like I said, I never thought of myself as a mother, but when the baby came it was...good. Difficult, for sure, being a single mother, but I lived with a friend of mine who had a three year old, and I’d already gotten some experience with kids. It worked well, the two of us helping one another. I was luckier than most. I didn’t expect—

I didn’t expect I would love him so much. It sounds terrible, but—it’s different. Knowing that you should love your baby and feeling it. Maybe it all comes back to being seen, in its own way. My son looked up at me, and I was his entire world. If I was drifting before, now I was solid. If I was ephemeral, now I had direction. I meant something to someone, someone who needed me, and putting one foot in front of the other made sense in a way it never had before.

I think they noticed, when I went back to work. I was bolder, more assertive and comfortable in my own place there, rather than wistfully watching from the wings. I didn’t have to be jealous of the way the actors could flip through their masks like a catalog of identities, because I was finally certain of my own. I even toyed with the idea of acting a bit myself—it would never happen, of course. My job kept me busy enough and I hardly had time to take on more when I could barely afford daycare as it was. But I thought about it, and it made the future exciting. Every day, even the hard ones, felt like it was a new possibility. 

And then he got sick. 

I won’t get into the details—please don’t ask me. I remember them, I promise you. It’s the one thing I can remember, through all of this. The hospitals and the late nights and the cold, sick fear that lived in my gut, its own kind of disease. I got so used to sitting in waiting rooms that I started to form opinions on the chairs. The plastic ones look cheaper, but they’re more comfortable than the wood. If you lean just right you can get them to bend a bit in the back, so you can sleep a little easier. Not that you sleep anyway, but pretending helps sometimes. Even on the days I’ve forgotten his name, his face, the color of his favorite blanket, I remember that. 

I remember the waiting, every second weighted as heavily as the one before it. Usually time blends into itself, the more mundane parts of it glossed over to make it just a bit easier to bear. This was different. There’s a moment when you know how things are going to end. You hope and you pray and you listen to doctors pretend to be optimistic, but you know. And time comes so heavily, seconds plodding into minutes into hours like soldiers with heavy booted feet, and you realize that your perception of time has always meant nothing. That this is the truth—this steady, unwavering march that you’re forced to watch from the sidelines. You wake up and you wait. You wake up and you wonder. You wake up and every tick of the clock feels like your last.

And then it’s over. 

I waited a month to go back to work, after I lost him. It worked out well, because we were between shows, so they didn’t miss me as much as they might have. The Glass Menagerie and Twelfth Night. Not that anyone pressured me to come back. They were all lovely, all understanding, all willing to give me whatever I needed. I told them that what I needed was something else to focus on, and maybe it was true in some way, but mostly it was easier than saying that I didn’t know what I needed, or what they could give me. 

And then everything just...went back to normal. I mean it didn’t—my son was still gone, but it was like the world paused on its axis for a moment, only to go on spinning, and if I didn’t keep up with it, I’d fall right over the edge. I got up. I went to work. I came home. I got caught in traffic and watched bad television and every mundane, everyday thing that just keeps on happening. It was like the world had ended, only to wake up the next day to find that no one else had noticed. And I had no choice but to fall into step next to them.

What other choice did I have? I couldn’t just stop. I had bills to pay and appearances to keep up. I had to be normal, even if it was only pretending. Sometimes I even believed it. 

And that’s when it began. 

It was only little things at first—easy to brush off as a slip of the tongue, though it bothered me more than I ever let on. I don’t know if it was the first incident, I suppose there could have been other, smaller things that I didn’t notice, but it was the first that really jarred me. I worked with a woman named Cheryl. She did the accounting for the theater. We were never close, but it was a small theater, and we knew each other well enough for coworkers. One day she was telling me about her daughter’s pregnancy. I was already a bit uncomfortable—things like that...they weren’t triggers exactly, but something close. Like a bruise, maybe. All right, so long as you didn’t press too hard. But what got me was when she asked if I was planning on having children. 

It caught me completely off guard. I stammered something—some vague reference to my son, maybe, I can’t remember—when a delivery man knocked on the door and facilitated my escape. I tried to tell myself that it was simple absentmindedness—Cheryl was getting older, and it wasn’t the first time someone had said something that carelessly pressed on the bruise. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the way she’d said it. 

Cheryl had been at the baby shower the theater threw for me, the month before my son was born. I still had the hat she’d knitted for him, soft blue wool with little ears like a bear. How could she forget something like that?

It only got worse, after that. Once I’d noticed the mistakes, I couldn’t stop. People would act like I’d never had a son at all, that I’d never been a mother. At first I thought it was just cruelty, but it was more than that. I found my roommate packing up his old things, saying that her daughter didn’t need them anymore, confused that she was still holding onto a crib after all these years. She didn’t understand when I told her that they were mine—was I pregnant? Was I expecting to be? I didn’t know how to tell her what she already knew. I spent longer hours at work, where it was easier to pretend that the gap wasn’t there. The more people forgot, the more I felt the press to be normal. It was like suffocating, but whenever I opened my mouth, I couldn’t find the words. What could I tell them that they would believe? To them, I wasn’t the grieving mother. To them, I’d never even had a son. 

And for the first time, she felt like she truly understood the actors on the stage. The smile underneath the glare of stage lights, the sparkle in empty eyes. A mask grins, but if you hold it in your hands, you’ll find that it’s empty on the other side, concave where it’s been molded into something beautiful. That’s how she felt, like a mask with nothing behind it, like a—

****

ARCHIVIST

She?

**UNKNOWN**

What?

****

ARCHIVIST

You said she. Like you were talking about someone else.

**UNKNOWN**

Oh. Did I?

I—I carried on like that for as long as I could, but it only got worse. It wasn’t just my son being forgotten, it was everything. An actor I’d worked with for years would forget my name and no one would correct them. My own mother forgot what university I went to. And it wasn’t just forgetfulness. The night my mother forgot my alma mater, I went home and I pulled out my degree. I don’t know what prompted me to do it. I already felt out of my own head. I suppose I wanted to hold something that would remind myself who I was. That I was real, my memories were real, and I wasn’t the crazy one.

But it was wrong. The school on the degree was wrong, and the name on it, too. I only knew for certain that it had to be mine because it was somewhere no one else knew about, in a storage container of important documents hidden under my bed. My son’s birth certificate was on top of it, the corners soft where I’d held it one too many times. His name was wrong. 

What was I supposed to do? I went to work. I smiled. I felt myself slowly disappear. 

I was mist behind the mask, pieces of me stolen every time someone forgot something new, or rearranged the pieces of my life into a story that suited them better. I began to forget too. It was like water wearing down a stone. I could remember the shape of my life, what I believed to be my life, but the more I clung to the details, the faster I lost them. Names first. Then faces. I hardly even recognized myself in the mirror, except to know that my eyes were the wrong color. I don’t know when that happened. 

I don’t know when I started to lose pieces of myself—if it was real or just another thing I imagined. I would look down and find empty air where I could still feel flesh and bone. A finger. A hand. My left eye, the curve of my empty smile. I really was mist, burning up beneath the glare of the sun, of the weight of a thousand eyes that thought they could really see me. At that point I could hardly even care. I was a creature of memory, or lack thereof, trapped in the empty space left behind by what I had lost. 

I always remembered the hospital. I thought of it as the place where I lost myself, but I don’t think that’s true. I think that’s the place where I found her.

She went back, again and again, haunting sterile white halls like a ghost. It didn’t matter what name she scrawled on that cheerful little sticker—the staff never remembered anyway. It felt right, being there, seeing people made into bruises, their hurt pulsing in time with her own. Even when she couldn’t remember who she was or who she lost, she could see them, see their tears, listen to their sobs and feel them in her chest as if they were her own. They drew her forward, like a fly to blood. That’s what scavengers do. They smell out weakness, and they feed off of it. 

Each grief is something that makes her whole again, piece by piece, a patchwork of human suffering. If they could see her, she wouldn’t look like herself anymore, simply because she is not. But they never notice her, sitting in waiting rooms and hospital cafes, too lost in their own slow motion tragedies. She listens to their stories and makes them into prosthetics for herself, facsimiles of grief to place in the emptiness left inside of her, regardless of the emptiness she leaves behind. They should thank her, she tells herself, holding their pain close. She took it away. She gave it a home. And unlike her, they’ll never know it’s missing. 

****

ARCHIVIST

Who are you?

**UNKNOWN**

Don’t ask me that.

****

ARCHIVIST

Who are you?

**UNKNOWN**

I’m the grieving mother with her lost son, burning up like mist under the glare of the stage lights, her smile so tight and permanent that it hurts. I want them to see me, but the weight of their eyes is unbearable.

I’m the husband sitting beside a hospital bed, a pen shaking in my hand because I have to sign the form. There’s no coming back from that sort of accident. That’s no way to live, there’s no coming back from that. I know I’m fooling myself, but all I want him to do is open his eyes.

I’m the child being taken away, being shuffled into in an unfamiliar car and taken to somewhere unknowable. I press my thumb against the bruises around my wrist and pretend they’re a bracelet, pretend they’re a gift, pretend they don’t hurt. I wonder what I did wrong. I want to disappear. 

I’m the Archivist. So much scar tissue, and that’s only what people can see. Orphaned young and unloved ever since. There are some people only a mother can love, but that doesn’t stop me from wishing it wasn’t so. 

****

ARCHIVIST

Stop.

**UNKNOWN**

Will anyone but the archives miss me when I’m gone? Will I disappear without a trace, one more story to gather dust? Was I born broken, or was that a choice I made? I want—

****

ARCHIVIST

Stop!

**UNKNOWN**

I’m not your enemy, Archivist.

****

ARCHIVIST

I don’t…

I don’t think you know who you are.

**UNKNOWN**

Yes, I… Yes. I think you may be right.

You’re afraid of it. Don’t be. I give them a gift, don’t you see? Sometimes it hurts too much to be yourself. It’s the same gift that woman gave herself. She said it herself to you, just earlier—we see tragedy and we’re grateful that it’s not us. But it always catches up with us sooner or later. I know that. You know that. 

You can be someone else. Someone far away from your own pain. Someone without a name. 

I told you I don’t have a name, Archivist. I don’t need one. 

****

ARCHIVIST

I have a name.

**UNKNOWN**

Do you?

****

ARCHIVIST

We’re done here.

[CLICK]

**Author's Note:**

> done for the Avatar of Fear zine which can be downloaded for free at [here!](https://avataroffearzine.tumblr.com/post/639155338580525056/hey-everyone-the-avatar-of-fear-a-magnus-archive) it's full of a lot of amazing work, be sure to check it out!
> 
> I'm on tumblr at [divineatrophy](https://divineatrophy.tumblr.com/) and twitter at [blueskiddoodle!](https://twitter.com/blueskiddoodle)


End file.
